**** Linguistic Team Guidelines ****

This is my attempt to recreate a conversation that took place through personal messages between Julie (gentlejewel), Rodrigo (nomada), Di Anna and myself.

FROM JULIE

Quoted

Hi!

I keep on updating the wiki with done when a project is finished, but every time I go back i see the 'done's' taken away.... I'm starting to think that that's not what I'm supposed to do and someone is taking them away - or am i losing my mind a little?

Kisses!
Julie

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "brunodc" (Oct 26th 2011, 9:45am)

you're not losing your mind, I deleted those "done" mentions because either we follow that logic and put "done" for every step that completed or not at all. I went with the lazy option of not mentioning it at all.

Sorry for not telling you, I'm so used to do these things that I don't really think anymore

P.S : something I didn't tell you: when you visit a wiki page, there's a "watch" button on the menubar near the "edit" button. If you click on it, the wiki will send you a notification email whenever tha particular "watched" page is modified, which bring me to my point.
When you save a page, you have a "summary" textbox where we usually type what we've just done, like "Michal has finished transcribing" blablabla.

And that message appears in the wiki history AND in the notification email, which means that you only have to read the email to know what's going on in the wiki

Quoted

Hello!

On advice from Roddy I checked out the tea and cookies section to see if I could be of help there somehow and I came across the discussion about the comma rule... Of course I know about the comma rule because you (Bruno) told me about it but I decided to finally go and thoroughly read the 'Guidelines'...

I, as well as most other people in my life (except for maybe my 'husband' - we're not married but it's just easier to say it like that for me), have always felt a resistance to read instruction manuals. I will perhaps look at it for a few seconds but then close it abruptly being overwhelmed by all the info and think to myself, "well, let's just see if i can figure it out on my own by trying to use it," and this works in 95% of the cases because most things are 'logical' to use. And after seeing the work of new members (even newer than myself ) I can only imagine that they too have this mindset for not reading the guidelines: the were a lot of commas at the end of strings on a piece that JonWit was proofreading (I think you know which one I'm talking about Bruno?) for example, and Rakosnicek (bless his heart - what a champion he is ) also had a lot of commas at the end of strings, although on the last piece that I proofread there were hardly any...

So anyway - I'm going through the guidelines (which I must say, I find super eloquently written but perhaps with too many 'big words' if you know what I mean) and I cannot for the life of me find where it explains the comma rule! It must be in there somewhere but I JUST CAN'T FIND IT.

So I was thinking, is it perhaps an idea to make individual 'top 10's (or top 5's or whatever) guidelines for the transcribers, the proofreaders and the time-shifters (that are perhaps in more layman terms)? It would be my pleasure to propose something like this for you guys to look over. Let me know if you think it's a good idea...

xx Julie

PS - don't you think it would be great if we had the possibility to put things in italic on Dotsub?

I just added some elements to the guidelines yesterday according to the google doc that Di Anna started.

Having 10 most important rules doesn't change the fact that newcomers will have to use the guidelines like a "bible", the kind of document that's open in a tab on your browser as you get started and which you come back to whenever you're wondering about something. It's not something you learn by heart and only refer to once

We just have to make the effort to make sure newcomers have read the guidelines before they get started. Newcomers are eager to do something, so they might just read what they need to do to start transcribing/proofreading, but later on they realize they probably had to learn more about the process. Jon is a perfect example of that.

As long as they start with 1st rounds of proofreading, I think our system allows for them to make mistakes early on without slowing down the team too much.

Quoted

Wow! This is the first time I see this page... Was it there all the time or have you been very busy Bruno ? I think they're great only I have a few comments:

The ... - I know it's only used if the sentence is broken off but for me it also explains that you're going on to a different subject. But I can live without using them .

The hyphen is another story in my opinion (and please don't be angry with me) as I find it very, very important for punctuation (nobody else?). Why not use something else instead of using something that's used for punctuation to show another speaker when there are so many keys on the keyboard that we could use? Perhaps * or -- or > or ~. Help!

Double ("...") and single ('...') quotation marks or inverted
commas (you can use either term) can be used in the same ways. Whether
you use double or single is up to you.

You could use double for quotations and single for titles. This is
what we do in Writing for University Courses. It can help
the reader to see which are quotes and which are titles.

Whatever you do you must be consistent, i.e. do it all the way through
your piece of work. This is partly because it looks better, but also
to avoid
the reader being confused.

To show titles

If you refer to a title (e.g. of a book or film etc.) in your text
it should be clear that it is a title. You do this by placing it in inverted
commas. In titles, main words usually start with a capital letter.

Quoted

Oh - and if my comments have been taken into consideration by everyone and the consensus is still no hyphen, then I will just change my punctuation style. It will take me a while to get my brains around it though as putting things in brackets or what is it that you call them - parenthesis - makes what's in them (to my feeling) less important. xx

Quoted

Wow!! How a little pause for sharing and brainstorming on what we are doing can bring so many ideas and improvements Way to go Julie!!

Maybe these discussions should be done in the Tea&Cookies room, on that comas thread, and the guidelines become important and a part of everyone if they discuss it?

Currently I am trying to build a transcriptions team. Iskren is doing a tutorial on how to transcribe/timeshift offline when using Linux as operative system. I am doing it for Windows. With the offline tool being used, the timeshifting but also many proofreading issues will be overcome thanx to the technical ability of these software and the spellchekers included. So, considering that on a 1st round of proofreading, a timeshifting and even on a 2nd round, there can be always the need to cut/add stuff and move words from one string to the next, the comas position might change. So, maybe we dont need to worry about comas in the end of strings because we can take them all away, in the end (final revision) by applying Bruno's tool? http://tzmlt.byethost22.com/analyze/

After this thinking above here, if the transcription team focuses only on the string structure guidelines, their task is easier and they don't need to go through all the guidelines. Then, there are only certain guidelines for the proofreaders too. These we can't split them in guidelines for round1 and guidelines for round2 I guess, but maybe the proofers don't have to look at them all in that wiki page and get scared with it? Could that be a solution for them to start reading them?
I feel I made a messed up speech here. Let me know if anything is not so clear.
hugs

Quoted

Hey sweet Roddy,

As nice as it is to hear, I'm not sure why i get a 'way-to-go Julie' - did I miss something in the email communication? I thought that it could put a lot of commotion in the teas and cookies room if I'd put the text of my email in there - you don't think so?

The results that you can get from using the analysis tool look great by the way! Why are the results better when you do it in offline mode? Because no-one else can 'interrupt' you then or something?

I believe my problem with the guidelines was that I would only go the http://wiki.linguisticteam.org/w/Linguistic_Team_Guidelines/ instead of to the English Language Guidelines page... I did go to the methodology page - I really can't tell you why I didn't go the EGL and I find rather strange of myself. One thing I'm pretty sure about is that whenever I've followed the link for the guidelines, I've ended up on LTG page and I believe it would be much handier if it went to the EGL straight away - my opinion only. I think the rules woops guidelines are pretty clear like that only it could be really beneficial to individualize them... All the words: preposition, conjunction, complement, predicate, prepositional phrase freaked me out a bit though - it's such a long time ago and I can't remember if I've ever learned these things at school (although I left school at age 14 so that I could help pay the bills and maybe that came after...). In short, I believe that if you simplify things (or perhaps condense is a better word) and perhaps even throw in a little humor here and there, that more people would read them more thoroughly.

Quoted

Holy Moly! LingTeam! Everybody's been up all night brainstorming! Goooood! Hm... let's see if I can make sense of all the messages?

@gentle jewel: I'm sure we can do a better job directing newbies to the "Guidelines" that you just saw for the first time. Hey, not to mention the "oldbies" need it handy too 'cause all of us can refresh our memories about team decisions regarding rules, etc. I think it's important to remember that like all plans in an RBE, our rules & regs are emerging too. Sweet Nomada and m' Sweet Lord Bru-Bru are always working on new tools that hopefully will make the process easier for us all. Having said that, here we are:

About the hyphens: As I understand it, the use of hyphens to indicate a change of speaker is a convention used by the hearing impaired in subtitles. This is why we have chosen NOT to use hyphens freely in our punctuation of strings. This will be confusing for our hearing impaired population.

About the quotation rule you found: I saw the exact same rule when I was searching for "the latest". Lord Bru? I kinda agree with Gentle Jewel that if we use double quotes for direct quotations and single quotes for words, phrases, or quotes within quotes, this would be "cleaner" in subtitles. (I have to admit my old English professors would cringe at what I just said ). Still, in subtitles I think it's important to keep the busyness out of it. Making them clean and concise would be the most important. Maybe others could weigh in on how quotation marks look in subtitles??

@Julie: Hey, there new girlfriend! How nice to see another lady proofer in the mix. I did the same thing with commas when I began proofing too. Just like Jon, I put commas where ever they needed to be, and I didn't pay any attention to the rule ('cause I didn't know about it actually). Sooooooo, yes we need to do a better idea of telling folks upfront. Maybe we could do something like "special cases" that refer only to subtitling? Hey, that's what "emerging" is all about, right? Looking for better ways to make us the best! Meanwhile, these are good topics for TeamSpeak meetups.

Me? I'm as happy as can be that all this discussion is happening. Nice to meet you, Gentle Jewel and Julie.
Hugs to all you special folks who spread the message to the world!

Quoted

Quoted from "gentlejewel"
s nice as it is to hear, I'm not sure why i get a 'way-to-go Julie' - did I miss something in the email communication?

hehe. for the initiative of coming with the brainstorming and sharing pause is already enough

Quoted from "gentlejewel"
I thought that it could put a lot of commotion in the teas and cookies room if I'd put the text of my email in there - you don't think so?

yes. I agree that posting this there is enough to spark the discussion and participation from all.

Quoted from "gentlejewel"
Why are the results better when you do it in offline mode? Because no-one else can 'interrupt' you then or something?

Not because of that. because while transcribing in that offline tool we have a sound wave graphic where we can click and drag selected areas, to determine from where to where will the subtitle string be created, instead of a play/pause button in dotsub. Also it tells us the amount of characters in the strings and the ratio character/minute, so we know if the strings the way we are building them are resulting in a good/stressed reading time. There is a spellchecker too that will help non-English natives to transcribe more correctly.

I agree with all that you said after about the guidelines, and just by giving your perspective on it it helps understand what newcomers are perceiving and feeling when they get here.

Another thing I would like to share: I am not correcting the English nor taking away comas from the end of strings, as I think they will help the work of the 2nd proofreader when determining if the text is well built. I think that only in the end of everything we should take the comas away. Also if the comas come in the strings when the transcription come to my hands for timeshifting, it will help me determine the good spots to cut the strings (Sometimes speakers go so fast and inarticulated that I dont know which are nouns and which are predicates

Quoted

Oh, Gentle Jewel: I forgot to mention the ellipses (...). Traditionally, it simply means something's omitted. I would agree with our LingTeam Guideline to use it only for incomplete sentences. Discussion, anyone?

I think it makes sense to use single quotes for lone words or expressions and double quotes for quotes. I'm gonna update the guidelines.

[EDIT] No, on second thought, I won't update the guidelines, because I'm gonna need examples. I think I'm gonna make a table for this, like the "appropriate" "inappropriate" ones. If anyone has examples handy for that double quotes rule, please post 'em